I think the most impacting -- if not obvious -- things that begin to emerge when we consider instances of difference in composition theory are the implications of position in terms of culture, politics, and history. Nowhere in our reading before this week's (aside from some passing references) do we see with much weight the importance of writing in its place outside of the academy and in that academy's purpose (e.g., now we are talking about multiple languages/discourses having their own merit for their own circumstances and speakers -- and where the academic writing course fits, what role it should play, among them -- instead of there being one single and correct discourse that writing courses should espouse by means of formalist or current traditional approaches). In other words, error is repositioned in the eye of the beholder. In fact, the entire question of what is right by students and their futures and how teachers should cater to that is thrown wide open.
While there was some effort for students to find their authentic voice in expressivist theories, we are reminded by bell hooks and others not only that students (and citizens in general) are capable of commanding a range of different voices that are each authentic in their own respects but also that in all likelihood none of us actually possess a single authentic voice. And so the consequences of this include wrestling with the question, should teaching students to adopt multiple voices for multiple situations be apart of the curriculum?
Thoughts and discussions on difference also require us to reckon with our own subjectivity, fallibility, and quickness to rely on acculturated assumptions about everything from whether a particular form of be is correct to whether our own complicity and even enthusiasm in the state of things is equivalent to the Nuremberg-era notion of "just following orders."
Adding difference to the comp-theory mix brings about a realization of how much context/subject position/situatedness/history/power matter in the development of a theory of composing.
Stephen notes issues of what role an/the academic writing course should play, and what role writing instruction might play in students’ adoption of/transfer of multiple voices in multiple situations. It seems these concerns don’t have broad, easy answers—things get messy when trying to figure out who decides what purposes writing should have for whom, and trying to figure out the which, where, and how of multiplicity of voice.
One thing that seems important when considering difference and composing, is the relationship between position and action. Royster notes the importance of subject position, and “[s]ubjectivity as a defining value pays attention dynamically to context, ways of knowing, language abilities, and experience, and by doing so it has a consequent potential to deepen, broaden, and enrich our interpretive views in dynamic ways as well” (1117). Royster’s call for fostering listening as key to beneficial collaboration, understanding, and negotiation in a cross-boundary discourse (1124-6) makes subject position awareness an important aspect of comp. theory. Lyons’ focus on rhetorical sovereignty helps us see the importance of subject position awareness in relation to action. His example of Ballenger’s appropriation of a perspective on Native American storytelling brings awareness to the problematic strand of some perspectives of multi-culturalism that allow for difference to be set off as a helpful other. The Ballenger example reminded me of Elizabeth Gilbert’s/Julia Roberts’ Eat Pray Love and so many other contemporary media examples of someone from within a privileged (that’s maybe a problematic word) position gleaning helpful and 'exotic' concepts from “the other” for their own self gain. We know that this is not difference, or what a composition theory of inclusion should be. It seems dependent upon what your subject position is what appropriate action one can take, but there is always context that calls for a greater awareness of notions of power and discourse at play.
When difference is considered in relation to composing processes and practices, I finally see composition theory becomes just that (theory) instead of composition pedagogy. While both definitely serve the same purpose (helping students become better writers), composition theories that consider difference and subject position ask students and instructors to turn inward, to question the kinds of writing are writers that are valued within a given discourse community. As Stephen discusses in his blog as well, I believe the readings this week also illuminate the ways in which language/discourse/writing in an academic setting become sites of conflict for sociocultural power and agency. I was particularly intrigued by Scott Richard Lyons’s article. Therein, he examines the implications of rhetoric used to describe an Other; Lyons demonstrates that the Otherness of an individual or group cannot only be constructed via rhetoric, it can also be perpetuated by that same rhetoric. He illustrates this using the varying treatment of American Indians in legal documents. Difference, then, becomes a cyclical, self-fulfilling prophecy. This is the very issue that the authors of the articles we read for this week would like to counteract. Recognizing difference, acknowledging the ways in which it manifests itself in composition, is the first step to combatting difference and the marginalization of entities in the world at large. Delpit’s article made me the most uncomfortable as a composition instructor. Last semester, I had one or two writers who I would have considered “basic” in their writing performance. However, by their last paper and reflection, these students were considering acceptable if not decent work. I am unsure, though, if they were producing texts that were actually rhetorically effective or if they were merely producing the texts they thought I would want? I wanted to teach them that they do possess multiple voices and that each voice can be adapted to fit each rhetorical situation, and I hope I did so, but I may have only helped them cultivate the voice that would please me as an instructor. The readings this week did expose me to theories of difference, but they also made me hyper-aware of how I treat difference in my own classroom (and how my own difference might be treated in the classes I am taking), but isn’t that the point?
What did I see in composition theory when difference was added to the mix—I saw a group of people (teachers) fearful and anxious about the new challenges that they were expected to face (and successfully overcome).
The group of writers we read this week point to specific groups of people who brought change to the meaning of composition and how composition is taught. Inexperienced writers, “Others,” American Indians, and ESL students all challenged the notions sustaining traditional approaches to composition (and teaching it). Shaughnessy, Royster, Delpit, Lyons, and Matsuda point to the need to value difference and respect it because this valuing and respect offers access to different ways of seeing, knowing, being, and acting.
Difference, here, is viewed as problematic, because it creates tension—tension that exists as a result of the need for change. If teachers adopt the attitude about students supported by assumptions like those made by Gee, we hinder the hopes of teachers and students alike to affect change. Difference means change, and change—especially for those in positions of comfort—is scary because it is inevitable that a transformation is about to occur. Those positions of comfort are challenged (and disappear) as change is enacted. Royster asks an imperative question that forces us to consider change: what “if we valued someone other than ourselves having a turn to speak?” (1125).
When inexperienced writers have the turn to speak, as Shaugnhnessy shows, we learn that “BW students write the way they do, not because they are slow or non-verbal, indifferent to or incapable of academic excellence, but because they are beginners and must, like all beginners, learn by making mistakes (390). Royster identifies the problematic issues with “trespass vision” and its implications for Others, and we learn from Delpit the obstacles teachers face when attempting to teach or “not teach” the dominant discourse. We are reminded of the hardships endured by the American Indian community from Lyons, and Matsuda shows how “being different” has affected ESL writers. These writers provide glimpses into just some of the issues surrounding the notion of difference, and, as Elizabeth suggests, it “get[s] messy when trying to figure out who decides what purposes writing should have for whom, and trying to figure out the which, where, and how of multiplicity of voice.”
When difference is ignored, as these writers illustrate, an opportunity is missed to learn something or experience something from another point of view. Shaughnessy argues that we need to “reduce the penalties for being culturally different” and, furthermore, we need to recognize the enrichment gained by the diversity of these groups of students (393). The mainstream is one perspective, but it’s not the only perspective, and as these writers demonstrate, a broader, more comprehensive point of view allows for a better understanding of composition.
I think a lot of ideological and utilitarian scaffolding is getting ignored by the discussion of difference. I think Delpit sums up what I mean clearly when she says, "that one never learns simply to read or write, but to read and write within some larger discourse, and therefore within some larger set of values and beliefs" (1312). That is to say, the teaching of writing isn't an objective instruction in some kind of empirical science: it's the training of someone in a set of rituals that construct a discourse. So when people discuss difference and how composition should go to some lengths to address and understand it, I have to ask "to what end"? If we are training people in a discourse, which we are always doing even if we try to "resist", then we are by definition exclusionary. The existence of a discourse always creates the Other and I struggle with the idea that one can even have a discourse that is inclusive in the way some of the writers of difference seem to be pushing towards.
When Delpit writes "Does it not smack of racism or classism to demand that these students put aside the language of their homes and communities and adopt a discourse that is not only alien, but that has often been instrumental in furthering their oppression?" I immediately thought "no". Teachers are not "demanding" anything of students. We aren't invading their homes and forcing them to do anything... They've elected to come to us and learn the rituals necessary to gain access to academic discourse. I think we actually do students a disservice by by struggling against indoctrination. They don't come to us to have their way of life validated or to learn how to speak the way they speak around the house. They come to us to gain access, to know how to perform in either academia or the professional workplace, and reinforcing the way they already write and speak does not get them that access they are very explicitly here to gain.
Difference forces us to acknowledge our assumptions about language and the ideological beliefs embedded in these assumptions. This reconsideration of the content and methods used in composition courses leads to the tensions/conflicts/anxieties that Jen points to—a reconsideration that falls largely to a marginalized labor force. Matsuda considers labor directly, but many of the articles do not. Certainly, as Matsuda claims, teaching second language learners takes more time than teaching students for whom English/English academic discourse is “natural.” Obviously, it is more difficult to teach students to write when the assumptions about writing and the rules by which composition is constructed are contested. What is not considered so much in our readings is the likelihood that a teacher who encounters “Basic Writers” has significantly more students and less job security than a teacher who does not. Throughout the semester, we have studied the ways in which the view of composition as a grooming of the unassimilated has both damaged the field/discipline and given rise to important questions about the relationships between knowledge, language and power. I would argue that these questions are no more present in the field/discipline today than they are on the outskirts of higher education—community colleges, “Basic Writing” classes at four year universities, academic tutoring. Though I think the arguments made by all of these theorists provide springboards for necessary conversations and considerations of composition pedagogy, I can see why the most simplistic (and ethically questionable) arguments might be the most compelling for the people who are teaching these kids and not just theorizing about them. Like Logan, I found Delpit’s line of thinking to be the most problematic. She questions “inevitability arguments” and yet underpins her argument with a belief in the inevitability of dominant discourse’s absolute power. She suggests that one reason for learning the dominant discourse is to challenge belief systems within it, but she cannot imagine a type of argument that might require a different type of discourse. She also relies heavily on anecdotal evidence in a way that seems intent upon silencing the experience of struggling writers—i.e. “This guy came from your background, and he succeeded. . .therefore, if you aren’t succeeding, you might not be working hard enough.” That said, as someone who has taught “Basic Writers,” who knows how frustrating it is to enter a teaching environment in which you feel absolutely overwhelmed, I can understand why an argument which says, “You don’t have to rethink everything. Just keep teaching the dominant discourse and believing in your students” would be really, really appealing. When I was teaching “Basic Writers,” I was teaching at a community college and at a four-year university. I had five sections of classes, no office or office hours, no health insurance and a one-hour commute. Many of my students were writing at third or fourth grade levels. Some had not graduated from high school. Many of the students were suspicious if not entirely hostile toward higher education. Every time I collected essays, a handful of students had plagiarized. (Yes, we spent A LOT of time talking about citation). It was very difficult not to feel useless and overwhelmed. Pedagogies that offered concrete suggestions and promised visible results were really appealing.
Diversity, or difference, adds both new perspectives to composition theory and sites of contention. Royster wrote, “[T]he most salient point to acknowledge is that 'subject' position really is everything." By examining our students’ ways of knowing and looking at composition kaleidoscopically, we see that the teaching of composition is not cookie-cutter friendly. The arena of education is a contact zone, which by Royster’s definition is a place where disagreement is bound to occur. Like Miriam, I have taught (am teaching) students who are oftentimes labeled “Basic Writers” and pedagogies that promise concrete results (although oftentimes they do not deliver) are appealing. However, one of the questions being put forth by this week’s readings is what is the cost for our students if we buy into pedagogies and programs that sacrifice the individual for standardization (or marginalization) of voice?
Shaughnessy, Lu, Royster, and Delpit all make reference to the idea of academic discourse versus dominant discourse. Delpit posits that one fear of some teachers is that they are acting as agents of oppression by teaching students of varying socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds mainstream discourses thereby damaging their home language or placing it beneath academic discourse, which tends to be situated in white middle-class values. This worry is reflective of the “we” not “I” stance of educating that Lyons urges us to take, a stance that is central to education if education to be a vehicle of democratic ideologies. While I agree with Larkin that students come to institutes of higher education “to gain access, to know how to perform in either academia or the professional workplace,” I also feel that devaluing a person’s home language is a way of devaluing his/her culture, which is criminal in my mind. As the beginning of Shaughnessy’s essay points out, many of the people labeled as “Basic Writers” go to college because they view it as a way to gain upward mobility in our capitalistic society. Many impoverished students see college as something they have to do in order to earn a living wage, which their parents do not make working long hours at multiple jobs; they do not go to college to have the voices of loved ones proclaimed inadequate. This is why Delpit’s message is so important; we must respect the multiplicity of voices that our students bring with them and help them to see that academic language is just one voice that they can choose to utilize.
What does difference add to composition theory? Thinking it best to start with a definition of “difference” in relation to these articles, I propose that it resoundingly centers on differences in the student body composite and their use of language. Out of this and into Melville’s “little lower layer” is the discovery by some teachers who are true to the profession that the BW (beginning writer) is his difference in language expression and usage. Influences like lower SES, neighborhood and peer support groups, parental literacy levels, and hours absorbing media shows all weigh heavily on the beginning college writer – the writer with very basic skills and experiences. The “pressures and codes and confusion” all emerge from these writers (393). As Mina Shaughnessy considers for her readers and we should too as educators, our language continues “stretching and reshaping and enriching itself with every language and dialect it has encountered. Our differences today within the composition classroom zeros in on the diversity of cultures and their languages that clash and enhance the course’s content and atmosphere. Given in Myers’ book Changing Our Minds: Negotiating English and Literacy, where he discusses the changing face of literacy in our educational system through America’s historical periods, we see that with our current new translation/critical literacy stage where student-centered learning and teaching is the norm and language diversity is embraced by teachers who need to bring their students to a level of acceptable SE before they graduate, the challenge is in the mix of students: so many come from parental backgrounds that are culturally and educationally diverse, where English is not spoken at home or education is not emphasized as the way out of the ghetto. But, what richness they bring to our language and our classrooms is obvious as new word additions appear ensconced in English.
Part ii What we need to do is not fear the errors that they make, but give them first the confidence to write our language through open-minded dialogue and gentle but necessary corrections – those “errors” that Shaughnessy speaks of that catapult the writer into high anxiety and thus, cause him to shut down and disengage. But, it is also our job to get our students to bridge the discourse gorge with various sturdy bridges to traverse the academic field and the outside world field that they bounce between daily. It is “politically innocent vehicle of meaning” according to Shaughnessy; not so to Lu who counters that “because different discourses do not enjoy equal political power in current-day America” (773) and readily plunge the writer into the gorge filled with self-doubt and language poverty.
However, as Lu argues, meaning cannot be separated from language – it cannot be “coaxed to the surface” as it is not separate from how language is structured. Thus, as with all of these essays, although diverse dialogue is the overarching theme, the real nugget of gold is in the differences on how language is defined and determined as an operational element in the composing process. Different discourses do yield different language employed - a code switching like in speech occurs in writing. Shaughnessy seems to have de-emphasized this according to Lu and there lies a problem with recognizing differences in the discipline of composition studies. If neglected, Lu writes, Shaughnessy’s goals that she envisions may be unachievable (774). Social and political constraints always figure into our writing drafts and product. Our audience in many ways charges us a high cost of communicating. The outside world, although a potent change agent, is not the real focus in writing socially conscious writing: that voice comes from within the writer. No way should our language use in our writing be symptomatic of Hirsch’s “political neutrality” (780).
part iii Granted, then have I cast aside the essence of audience awareness? Not so. Choosing the right word is never lost within writing that speaks strongly a particular view. What is objectionable is the use of candy-coated or euphemistic language that masks dangerously the writer’s real reason for writing and his purpose. Teaching such a stance that Paulo Freire states in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed negates the student’s “construction of knowledge” (qtd. in Wood, et al. 46). If our writers’ voices are disenchanted and lack the channel through written expression, we basically have placed them as Royster explains as disruptive (1118) – if the voice is not ours, we are confined to artificiality. So, what does this have to do with differences? It is in the “cross-cultural” talk that Royster so inspires in her essay that we bridge our differences in writing theory and move back to a focus on voice in relation to language use as a way to reclaim self-identity.
Now, here’s the kicker: the beauty of reading these essays in this order is to realize, first, the movement that composition studies is taking as in race and ethnicity, and secondly, to realize that differences in theoretical pedagogy of writing courses sync with our classroom’s student makeup. “Marginalized communities” (1119) such as African American and Native American tend to have their identities striped within a writing class, one focused on prescriptive grammar instruction or one focused on changing the writer’s language to conform to SAE. The “discourses of multiculturalism and critical race theory, or anyone who sides with the oppressed or who works for community renewal” (1137) is in essence the change agents for differences in how we teach composition and how voice should be taught as a necessary ingredient to understanding language variety; more importantly, teachers need to embrace the students’ differences in order for them to open up and write more clearly and expressively. As Angie summarizes above, "Delpit posits that one fear of some teachers is that they are acting as agents of oppression by teaching students of varying socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds mainstream discourses thereby damaging their home language or placing it beneath academic discourse, which tends to be situated in white middle-class values." The essays' topic of differences in discourse bespeaks their similarity - language as a change agent for the marginalized.
I'm going to draw on my past experiences here. I agree with Jen. Difference does inspire some anxiety but I also think it challenges teachers to revamp their teaching pedagogies.
At UD, there is an abundance of ESL students and the writing program cannot accommodate all of them; to be clear, there is 1 section of ESL English 110. What happens to all the other ESL students? They get bumped into low-enrollment ENG 110, which is essentially considered remedial English and is meant for incoming freshmen that did not score high enough of their SATs or ACTs. I volunteered to teach a section of low-enrollment 110. I had 8 students. 1 from Nigeria and spoke French at home; 1 from Israel; 2 students who spoke Chinese and had what many teachers would consider only a basic understanding of English; and 4 students who spoke English but tested too low. Shaughnessy writes, "Most damaging of all, they have lost confidence in the very faculties that serve all language learners: their ability to distinguish between essential and redundant features of a language left them logical but wrong; their ability to draw analogies between what they knew of language when they began school and what they had to learn produced mistakes; and such was the quality of their instruction that no one saw the intelligence of their mistakes or thought to harness that intelligence in the service of language" (394).
That resonated with me because teaching low-enrollment 110 forced me to revise my teaching to better accommodate my students and challenged me to revise what I believe about writing and language. I decided to teach the course as a workshop because I wanted students to have lots of one-on-one time with me and to spend time working with their own writing, which is the best way to learn about writing. I taught them that systems of discourse have contexts: the way I talk to my best friends is not the way I talk to my mother or talk to Dr. Yancey, for example. Lu criticizes Shaughnessy's work because "such a view of the relationship between words and meaning overlooks the possibility that different ways of using words--different discourses--might exercise different constraints on how one 'crafts' the meaning 'one has in mind'" (774). Students have a right to their own language (channeling Peter Elbow here) and I didn't want to take that away so we spent a lot of time talking about the academy's language and its expectations and our writing activities led my students to practice using English in different contexts. Why certain ways of speaking English are more appropriate and valued more in some contexts than others. What I discovered about difference at the end of the semester is that my students wrote their reflections about feeling empowered that their language is considered "wrong," which was their past experiences and that they felt that they had learned what it means to write in college. I submitted more than one student's final work to the Arak Anthology, a collection of student writing. I was surprised that teaching this course challenged my understanding of academic discourse and the politics of the way we teach writing to students.
I'm in an illustrating mood tonight, so here's another story. Royster (in an article that I've read before) writes in his first scene, "I have found it extremely difficult to allow the voices and experiences of people that I care about deeply to be taken and handled so carelessly and without accountability by strangers" (1119). To me this speaks to the conferences we do in 1101 and 1102. I find that I am apprehensive about appropriating a student paper when they slide it across my desk and wait for the verdict on whether they did well or not. Like Royster argues, "An analysis of subject position reveals that these interpretations by those outside of the community are not random acts of unkindness. Instead, they embody ways of seeing, knowing, being, and acting that probably suggest as much about the speaker and the context as they do about the targeted subject matter. The advantage with this type of analysis, of course, is that we see the obvious need to contextualize the stranger's perspective among other interpretations and to recognize that an interpretive view is just that--interpretive" (1119). Thinking about this, then, makes me want to revise how I handle conferences. I had a student who wrote about a deeply abusive family situation and she wrote it in a vernacular English. I think I missed an opportunity to have a conversation about language and reader response. I was so apprehensive about commenting negatively about such a deeply personal experience for fear that criticizing the writing would make the student feel that I was dismissing the relevance of her experience. So, I didn't say anything about that paragraph other than that I was sorry to hear that it was something she lived through. Difference creates an opportunity to talk about ideology and discourse, to contextualize language use and why certain systems of language are privileged over others and the political implications of that; but difference can also be an unsettling fear of the unknown and (in my case) an anxiety about how to respond to a kind of writing that framed a personal narrative that I haven't encountered before.
Finally: Scott Lyons was my professor at my undergraduate institute and I took a senior seminar with him about Native American literature. He took a small group of us, myself included, to the CEA (College English Association) conference to present our final papers for the course. For me, Lyons expresses what the teaching of writing should become: "Rhetorical sovereignty is the inherent right and ability of peoples to determine their own communicative needs and desires in this pursuit, to decide for themselves the goals, modes, styles, and languages of public discourse. Placing the scene of writing squarely back into the particular contingency of the Indian rhetorical situation, rhetorical sovereignty requires of writing teachers more than a renewed commitment to listening and learning; it also requires a radical rethinking of how and what we teach as the written word at all levels of schooling, from preschool to graduate curricula and beyond" (1130). The paper I wrote for that course is about Sequoyah's syllabary, the first written alphabet for the Cherokee people. The syllabary is a sophisticated visual and textual discourse. It incorporates some appropriated English letters (I say appropriated because they are given their own rhetorical work) and some Native symbols and sounds. And it allowed the Cherokee people to write their own system of law and their own constitution and this effort went a long way to establishing their rhetorical sovereignty. The difference Lyons is calling for would require a radical revision of how the academy treats discourse. We would have to learn to value systems of language other than "Academy English" and talk about what that language (its modes and styles and goals, as Lyons puts it) is able to express that another system discourse would not be able to articulate in the same meaningful way.
For me, although these readings seem to have little in common, when difference enters the composition classroom it requires that we revise our notions of language, our ideologies about what languages are valued and what languages are not. And then, we need writing teachers to embrace the challenge not ignore it.
I keep coming back to Berlin and his axiom that no ideology is innocent. If academic writing is a site of “conflict for socio-cultural power and agency,” as Logan nicely phrased it, than for poor students and students of color, academic discourse is a Catch-22. On one hand academic discourse reifies an oppressive language system and on the other hand it must be taught. Lisa Delpit argues that “members of society need access to dominant discourses to (legally) have access to economic power” (1317). She then writes that the aim of the student is to “master the dominant discourses and to transform them” (1318). Likewise, Min-Zhan Lu writes that formal English is a “condition which [students] must recognize but can also call into question and change” (emphasis mine, 779). So it seems that the purpose of acquiring this discourse is not to codify the values of the dominant class, but to provide the student with another voice by which he or she will “reshape” and “resist” an unjust system (Delpit).
If no ideology is innocent, I see many pedagogical problems arising from this Catch-22. If one teaches the “the language of public transaction” (Shaughnessy) as a way to “cheat” the system, as Delpit proposes, what kind of ideology is motivating the teacher to do this? Many of these authors suggest that we as teachers are forthcoming in acknowledging the limitations and attendant problems of mastering this dominant discourse, but are teachers to withhold the ideology that underscores these beliefs? If ideology, like discourse, is so deeply embedded in our notion of self than how would a teacher even articulate an ideological position? What I’m wondering is at what point does composition instruction or any other field spill over into demagoguery? As Stephen said in his blog, the issue of difference raises the question of “what is right by students and their futures and how teachers should cater to that.” Is the job of a teacher to presuppose what is right and best for students? How do we know? Is there some public consensus? And further problems arise when one considers that composition teachers have themselves been trained in the dominant discourse despite passionately disagreeing with many of its oppressive ends. The role of the teacher in the classroom is precarious when dealing with difference.
Marx said that only revolution can overthrow the dominant ideologies. So in terms of teaching difference, are teachers trying to get revolt, assimilate, or assimilate-then-revolt? And aren’t we all already assimilated into an ideology that puts economy forward and first among all other values?
Our authors say that students need to develop their repertoire of available voices to fit a variety of rhetorical situations, but, troublingly, Lu argues that the dominant writing voice practiced in the classroom is really the teacher’s voice. In teaching writing, specifically the dominant academic discourse, she argues that teachers inadvertently transform the student’s meaning. I know I’ve had moments in conferences where, constrained by time or unsure how to proceed, I suddenly get prescriptive. The student and I are happy to be moving along, but I’m left with this queasy, lingering feeling that I’ve changed the original meaning of the words. In light of Delpit’s article I wonder if I haven’t unconsciously done worse: imposed my ideology on the student and compromised the way he or she views the subject.
I see difference working across these readings in several ways. First, each piece has identified a body of students in terms of shared “difference.” Mina Shaughnessy, for example, groups the students entering the “eleventh hour” of their educational careers as Basic Writers. Jacqueline Jones Royster discusses difference through an identification of the “subject position” of students -- in particular “Others” within the academy. It is this “subject position” that enables the visibility of cross-cultural boundary exchange that illustrates the importance of voicing and pov as shaping components in these exchanges. Paul Kei Matsuda’s difference is defined in terms of ESL students. If we think of a progression from “different” as an adjective describing various students within the academy to “difference” as a noun, we see the ways in which what is “different” is not limited to the local experiences of being or observing what is different. What is “different” instead emerges within a system and develops patterns -- patterns such as those discussed in the readings for this week. As a noun, “difference” becomes a social fact of our classrooms. Leigh’s experience at UD and Marian’s experience in Arizona speak to each other in multiple ways. These experiences also speak to a larger body of research that focuses on facilitating a dialogue that takes was is different in local experiences and projects it into the threads of disciplinary discussion that we are looking more closely at.
Difference is also operating across these readings in terms of the authors who are writing these pieces. Mina Shaughnessy was famously from the “frontier” of South Dakota, Paul Kei Matsuda is a Japanese American, Jacqueline Jones Royster finished her undergraduate at Spellman in Atlanta, Georgia. My point here is that these authors represent a variety of backgrounds -- they are themselves a snapshot of “difference” within the field.
Finally, there is difference as it is encountered by these authors in terms of their dealing with students. Elizabeth nods to this level, a the level that gives each of these pieces “material” that is illustrative of difference, when she writes: “Adding difference to the comp-theory mix brings about a realization of how much context/subject position/situatedness/power/history matter in the development of a new theory of composing.”
While we often focus on difference in the classroom in terms of practice, each of these micro discussions is getting at difference as it participates in the macro. Adding difference to the “mix of composition theory” seems to do three things in particular. First, it destabilizes any perception that the local is somehow representative of the whole. It reminds us of the importance of staying well informed and informing our theories of composition by reading widely across the field. Paul Kei Matsuda gestures to this when he reminds readers of the importance of reading TESL literature even if you consider yourself to not be teaching this particular groups of students. As our experiences resonate through the systematicity of our culture and the ways in which higher education participates in this, these experiences are not representative of a larger whole.
Secondly, adding difference to the mix destablizes that which these differences are discussed as being different from. Our glimpse into this conversation on difference illustrates the ways in which difference is material and lived in the experiences of our students, but necessarily (re)constructed within our textual discussions. Students clearly experience multiple, overlapping and conflicting differences. However, as this is handled in the literature, we are inclined to discuss these differences in terms of skill level, language background, race, class, etc. --- in other words, difference singular. Thus, the center, what all of these students are “different” from, withers away and becomes increasingly destabilized.
Finally, adding difference to the mix provides a mechanism of acknowledging the situatedness of what are often positioned as the foundational theories of composition within our field -- expressivism, process, etc. Theory can never be far removed from material context and ideological inheritance. These and other foundational premises of our field are reflective of the difference in experience and ideology that we as practitioners bring to and frame our work with. Difference is one mechanism that enables us to create more of a rich and kaleidoscopic body of understanding rather than a monolithic structure that is regarded as fixed. Jacqueline Jones Royster writes to this end when she says: “Using subject position as a terministic screen in cross-boundary discourse permits analysis to operate kaleidoscopically, thereby permitting interpretation to be richly informed by the converging of dialectal perspectives.”
Spencer beat me to referencing Berlin as a jumping off point for these readings. I too kept thinking back to his axiom that rhetoric is “always already ideological.” That is to say, each of these readings necessarily takes an ideological stance, even as they try to interrogate other ideologies. And we, as readers and responders, in turn bring our own ideologies to bear as we consider them. It all leaves me a bit baffled, even as this post-modern conundrum is hardly new territory for me. With reference to these readings about “difference,” the fundamental question seems to be if everything is ideological and culturally inscribed, how do we go about making good and ethical choices about how we conduct ourselves in the composition classroom? Whose “good” is being served by a given pedagogy? How can we know?
I think we can all agree (although beginning a sentence that way feels rather dangerous) that we want to serve our students as well as possible in the composition classroom. But it turns out, as we see from this week’s readings, that is a much more difficult task than we might have imagined. It also seems that we might need to back up a step or ten from what we thought was the starting point of the endeavor of teaching composition.
Larkin put forward the idea that we should not withhold the dominant discourse from students because of our own ideas of honoring difference (speak up if I’ve misinterpreted you!). I admit, I’ve had similar thoughts when considering how and what to teach my students. It’s a suggestion that has strong echoes of Shaughnessy’s piece. What I wonder about that idea now, considering it in reference to all the readings for this week, is who and what should we be serving in the classroom?
Suppose that some students in my class are less familiar with the dominant discourse than others. Not a crazy supposition by any means. My impulse is definitely to “correct” them. This feels helpful. But am I really helping a student by doing this? Even if my instruction helps a particular student to be more successful in the dominant culture, what have I really done for them if the cost of this “help” is reinforcing an oppressive cultural discourse that erases and denigrates competing voices? So, is the goal of the composition classroom to help individual students communicate more successfully in the dominant discourse? Or is is to attempt to gradually reshape the dominant discourse into something hopefully less oppressive and more open to different voices and kinds of discourse? I suspect the answer is somewhere in between.
I find myself dwelling on Lyons’ piece. It’s quite different from some of the others. What stuck with me about it was how clearly he showed that language is not merely words that have no effect. Words can be used to bring about real change. And when that change is meant to benefit one group of people by restricting the freedoms and sovereignty of another, we should take notice of it. The situation of the (presumably) well-meaning composition teacher would not seem to have much in common with the actions of the U.S. government regarding the legal status of American Indians, but I think that example should remind us that the work we do, teaching students how to use words, is not neutral or without consequence. And that, I suppose, is what I think a discussion of difference brings to composition. It forces us to surrender the attractive notion that, as Min-Zhan Lu says, “language [is] a politically innocent vehicle of meaning” (772).
Quoting Elizabeth: Adding difference to the comp-theory mix brings about a realization of how much context/subject position/situatedness/history/power matter in the development of a theory of composing.
*agreed: how much *do* they matter, especially given that presumably there is an audience to whom one is writing?
Stephen said, "students (and citizens in general) are capable of commanding a range of different voices": is this a new insight, or have we always known it? In other words, is what we see in the readings this week a new willingness to consider this range "normal" and perhaps even valuable? What are the advantages of doing so? What are the disadvantages?
Logan says, "As Stephen discusses in his blog as well, I believe the readings this week also illuminate the ways in which language/discourse/writing in an academic setting become sites of conflict for sociocultural power and agency." That's right, of course, and we see it play out both in the public and in the classroom: what are the connections between both?
Jen says, "Shaughnessy, Royster, Delpit, Lyons, and Matsuda point to the need to value difference and respect it because this valuing and respect offers access to different ways of seeing, knowing, being, and acting." At the same time, difference is also, as Jen notes, sometimes (perhaps often?), a source of tension. So is difference principally linguistic or cultural? Is there a way or ways of valuing difference inside of a curriculum? How does that work in a school setting where there are certain expectations that students are supposed to meet that may not afford such difference?
Larkin says, "They [students]come to us to gain access, to know how to perform in either academia or the professional workplace, and reinforcing the way they already write and speak does not get them that access they are very explicitly here to gain." Point taken. *But* does it matter how we go about it? And if so, what does that mean for teaching?
Marian speaks to the issue of labor: she's probably right that the more challenging the work of teaching, the lower it appears on a ladder of status/prestige. On the other hand, does it offer the most satisfaction? As important, Marian raises issues about the significance of difference in a challenging pedagogical setting: how does difference play out there? How might it?
Angie says, "This is why Delpit’s message is so important; we must respect the multiplicity of voices that our students bring with them and help them to see that academic language is just one voice that they can choose to utilize." I suspect that most (all?) of us agree with us. I think part of the appeal these readings make is for us to see difference horizontally, not vertically, and to treat all discourses as assets, not deficits. But what does this mean, specifically, in a classroom? And what is the connect between classroom and public at large and/or workplace?
AnnaMaria says, "Now, here’s the kicker: the beauty of reading these essays in this order is to realize, first, the movement that composition studies is taking as in race and ethnicity, and secondly, to realize that differences in theoretical pedagogy of writing courses sync with our classroom’s student makeup.
Following up on the quote: what are the differences in pedagogy that accommodate or support our students? And as interesting to me, if this is the pattern of development in the field/discipline (ie, increasing recognition and valuing of difference), is this a pattern we should expect to continue, and if so, why might that be important?
Leigh says, "I was so apprehensive about commenting negatively about such a deeply personal experience for fear that criticizing the writing would make the student feel that I was dismissing the relevance of her experience. So, I didn't say anything about that paragraph other than that I was sorry to hear that it was something she lived through. Difference creates an opportunity to talk about ideology and discourse, to contextualize language use and why certain systems of language are privileged over others and the political implications of that; but difference can also be an unsettling fear of the unknown and (in my case) an anxiety about how to respond to a kind of writing that framed a personal narrative that I haven't encountered before." So what does this mean in terms of assignments we make? And what does this mean in terms of how much explanation we provide to students? In other words, this approach makes sense to me, but it does change our curriculum, doesn't it?
Spencer says, "On one hand academic discourse reifies an oppressive language system and on the other hand it must be taught." Well, there's the tension in a nutshell. So a couple of questions. Isn't all language by definition oppressive if forced on a person? If so, it is academic language per se, or is it the forcing that's at issue here? On the other hand, isn't language--qua Bakhtin--flexible? Doesn't it change with use? In which case it's not a fixed entity? And do we worry about these same issues when it comes to the language of the major? Why/why not, and does that matter?
Katie says, "What is “different” instead emerges within a system and develops patterns -- patterns such as those discussed in the readings for this week." Exactly, though of course it's fair to note that you saw the patterns in part because of the way I clustered the readings. Was this clustering helpful or not? And as Katie says, given so much difference, the center becomes decentered, in Yeats' terms, perhaps a center that will not hold. Is this a problem? And if so, what do we make of it?
Stacy says, "With reference to these readings about “difference,” the fundamental question seems to be if everything is ideological and culturally inscribed, how do we go about making good and ethical choices about how we conduct ourselves in the composition classroom? Whose “good” is being served by a given pedagogy? How can we know?" For teaching, and as others have suggested, this seems to be a central question. For theory, what does all this difference mean? For example, is subject position the defining feature of any rhetorical situation, qua Royster?
Difference, as we see in this week's readings, can take many forms. What do we see in composition theory when difference is added to the mix?
I think the most impacting -- if not obvious -- things that begin to emerge when we consider instances of difference in composition theory are the implications of position in terms of culture, politics, and history. Nowhere in our reading before this week's (aside from some passing references) do we see with much weight the importance of writing in its place outside of the academy and in that academy's purpose (e.g., now we are talking about multiple languages/discourses having their own merit for their own circumstances and speakers -- and where the academic writing course fits, what role it should play, among them -- instead of there being one single and correct discourse that writing courses should espouse by means of formalist or current traditional approaches). In other words, error is repositioned in the eye of the beholder. In fact, the entire question of what is right by students and their futures and how teachers should cater to that is thrown wide open.
ReplyDeleteWhile there was some effort for students to find their authentic voice in expressivist theories, we are reminded by bell hooks and others not only that students (and citizens in general) are capable of commanding a range of different voices that are each authentic in their own respects but also that in all likelihood none of us actually possess a single authentic voice. And so the consequences of this include wrestling with the question, should teaching students to adopt multiple voices for multiple situations be apart of the curriculum?
Thoughts and discussions on difference also require us to reckon with our own subjectivity, fallibility, and quickness to rely on acculturated assumptions about everything from whether a particular form of be is correct to whether our own complicity and even enthusiasm in the state of things is equivalent to the Nuremberg-era notion of "just following orders."
Adding difference to the comp-theory mix brings about a realization of how much context/subject position/situatedness/history/power matter in the development of a theory of composing.
ReplyDeleteStephen notes issues of what role an/the academic writing course should play, and what role writing instruction might play in students’ adoption of/transfer of multiple voices in multiple situations. It seems these concerns don’t have broad, easy answers—things get messy when trying to figure out who decides what purposes writing should have for whom, and trying to figure out the which, where, and how of multiplicity of voice.
One thing that seems important when considering difference and composing, is the relationship between position and action. Royster notes the importance of subject position, and “[s]ubjectivity as a defining value pays attention dynamically to context, ways of knowing, language abilities, and experience, and by doing so it has a consequent potential to deepen, broaden, and enrich our interpretive views in dynamic ways as well” (1117). Royster’s call for fostering listening as key to beneficial collaboration, understanding, and negotiation in a cross-boundary discourse (1124-6) makes subject position awareness an important aspect of comp. theory. Lyons’ focus on rhetorical sovereignty helps us see the importance of subject position awareness in relation to action. His example of Ballenger’s appropriation of a perspective on Native American storytelling brings awareness to the problematic strand of some perspectives of multi-culturalism that allow for difference to be set off as a helpful other. The Ballenger example reminded me of Elizabeth Gilbert’s/Julia Roberts’ Eat Pray Love and so many other contemporary media examples of someone from within a privileged (that’s maybe a problematic word) position gleaning helpful and 'exotic' concepts from “the other” for their own self gain. We know that this is not difference, or what a composition theory of inclusion should be. It seems dependent upon what your subject position is what appropriate action one can take, but there is always context that calls for a greater awareness of notions of power and discourse at play.
When difference is considered in relation to composing processes and practices, I finally see composition theory becomes just that (theory) instead of composition pedagogy. While both definitely serve the same purpose (helping students become better writers), composition theories that consider difference and subject position ask students and instructors to turn inward, to question the kinds of writing are writers that are valued within a given discourse community.
ReplyDeleteAs Stephen discusses in his blog as well, I believe the readings this week also illuminate the ways in which language/discourse/writing in an academic setting become sites of conflict for sociocultural power and agency. I was particularly intrigued by Scott Richard Lyons’s article. Therein, he examines the implications of rhetoric used to describe an Other; Lyons demonstrates that the Otherness of an individual or group cannot only be constructed via rhetoric, it can also be perpetuated by that same rhetoric. He illustrates this using the varying treatment of American Indians in legal documents. Difference, then, becomes a cyclical, self-fulfilling prophecy. This is the very issue that the authors of the articles we read for this week would like to counteract. Recognizing difference, acknowledging the ways in which it manifests itself in composition, is the first step to combatting difference and the marginalization of entities in the world at large.
Delpit’s article made me the most uncomfortable as a composition instructor. Last semester, I had one or two writers who I would have considered “basic” in their writing performance. However, by their last paper and reflection, these students were considering acceptable if not decent work. I am unsure, though, if they were producing texts that were actually rhetorically effective or if they were merely producing the texts they thought I would want? I wanted to teach them that they do possess multiple voices and that each voice can be adapted to fit each rhetorical situation, and I hope I did so, but I may have only helped them cultivate the voice that would please me as an instructor. The readings this week did expose me to theories of difference, but they also made me hyper-aware of how I treat difference in my own classroom (and how my own difference might be treated in the classes I am taking), but isn’t that the point?
What did I see in composition theory when difference was added to the mix—I saw a group of people (teachers) fearful and anxious about the new challenges that they were expected to face (and successfully overcome).
ReplyDeleteThe group of writers we read this week point to specific groups of people who brought change to the meaning of composition and how composition is taught. Inexperienced writers, “Others,” American Indians, and ESL students all challenged the notions sustaining traditional approaches to composition (and teaching it). Shaughnessy, Royster, Delpit, Lyons, and Matsuda point to the need to value difference and respect it because this valuing and respect offers access to different ways of seeing, knowing, being, and acting.
Difference, here, is viewed as problematic, because it creates tension—tension that exists as a result of the need for change. If teachers adopt the attitude about students supported by assumptions like those made by Gee, we hinder the hopes of teachers and students alike to affect change. Difference means change, and change—especially for those in positions of comfort—is scary because it is inevitable that a transformation is about to occur. Those positions of comfort are challenged (and disappear) as change is enacted. Royster asks an imperative question that forces us to consider change: what “if we valued someone other than ourselves having a turn to speak?” (1125).
When inexperienced writers have the turn to speak, as Shaugnhnessy shows, we learn that “BW students write the way they do, not because they are slow or non-verbal, indifferent to or incapable of academic excellence, but because they are beginners and must, like all beginners, learn by making mistakes (390). Royster identifies the problematic issues with “trespass vision” and its implications for Others, and we learn from Delpit the obstacles teachers face when attempting to teach or “not teach” the dominant discourse. We are reminded of the hardships endured by the American Indian community from Lyons, and Matsuda shows how “being different” has affected ESL writers. These writers provide glimpses into just some of the issues surrounding the notion of difference, and, as Elizabeth suggests, it “get[s] messy when trying to figure out who decides what purposes writing should have for whom, and trying to figure out the which, where, and how of multiplicity of voice.”
When difference is ignored, as these writers illustrate, an opportunity is missed to learn something or experience something from another point of view. Shaughnessy argues that we need to “reduce the penalties for being culturally different” and, furthermore, we need to recognize the enrichment gained by the diversity of these groups of students (393). The mainstream is one perspective, but it’s not the only perspective, and as these writers demonstrate, a broader, more comprehensive point of view allows for a better understanding of composition.
I think a lot of ideological and utilitarian scaffolding is getting ignored by the discussion of difference. I think Delpit sums up what I mean clearly when she says, "that one never learns simply to read or write, but to read and write within some larger discourse, and therefore within some larger set of values and beliefs" (1312). That is to say, the teaching of writing isn't an objective instruction in some kind of empirical science: it's the training of someone in a set of rituals that construct a discourse. So when people discuss difference and how composition should go to some lengths to address and understand it, I have to ask "to what end"? If we are training people in a discourse, which we are always doing even if we try to "resist", then we are by definition exclusionary. The existence of a discourse always creates the Other and I struggle with the idea that one can even have a discourse that is inclusive in the way some of the writers of difference seem to be pushing towards.
ReplyDeleteWhen Delpit writes "Does it not smack of racism or classism to demand that these students put aside the language of their homes and communities and adopt a discourse that is not only alien, but that has often been instrumental in furthering their oppression?" I immediately thought "no". Teachers are not "demanding" anything of students. We aren't invading their homes and forcing them to do anything... They've elected to come to us and learn the rituals necessary to gain access to academic discourse. I think we actually do students a disservice by by struggling against indoctrination. They don't come to us to have their way of life validated or to learn how to speak the way they speak around the house. They come to us to gain access, to know how to perform in either academia or the professional workplace, and reinforcing the way they already write and speak does not get them that access they are very explicitly here to gain.
Difference forces us to acknowledge our assumptions about language and the ideological beliefs embedded in these assumptions. This reconsideration of the content and methods used in composition courses leads to the tensions/conflicts/anxieties that Jen points to—a reconsideration that falls largely to a marginalized labor force. Matsuda considers labor directly, but many of the articles do not. Certainly, as Matsuda claims, teaching second language learners takes more time than teaching students for whom English/English academic discourse is “natural.” Obviously, it is more difficult to teach students to write when the assumptions about writing and the rules by which composition is constructed are contested. What is not considered so much in our readings is the likelihood that a teacher who encounters “Basic Writers” has significantly more students and less job security than a teacher who does not.
ReplyDeleteThroughout the semester, we have studied the ways in which the view of composition as a grooming of the unassimilated has both damaged the field/discipline and given rise to important questions about the relationships between knowledge, language and power. I would argue that these questions are no more present in the field/discipline today than they are on the outskirts of higher education—community colleges, “Basic Writing” classes at four year universities, academic tutoring. Though I think the arguments made by all of these theorists provide springboards for necessary conversations and considerations of composition pedagogy, I can see why the most simplistic (and ethically questionable) arguments might be the most compelling for the people who are teaching these kids and not just theorizing about them.
Like Logan, I found Delpit’s line of thinking to be the most problematic. She questions “inevitability arguments” and yet underpins her argument with a belief in the inevitability of dominant discourse’s absolute power. She suggests that one reason for learning the dominant discourse is to challenge belief systems within it, but she cannot imagine a type of argument that might require a different type of discourse. She also relies heavily on anecdotal evidence in a way that seems intent upon silencing the experience of struggling writers—i.e. “This guy came from your background, and he succeeded. . .therefore, if you aren’t succeeding, you might not be working hard enough.”
That said, as someone who has taught “Basic Writers,” who knows how frustrating it is to enter a teaching environment in which you feel absolutely overwhelmed, I can understand why an argument which says, “You don’t have to rethink everything. Just keep teaching the dominant discourse and believing in your students” would be really, really appealing. When I was teaching “Basic Writers,” I was teaching at a community college and at a four-year university. I had five sections of classes, no office or office hours, no health insurance and a one-hour commute. Many of my students were writing at third or fourth grade levels. Some had not graduated from high school. Many of the students were suspicious if not entirely hostile toward higher education. Every time I collected essays, a handful of students had plagiarized. (Yes, we spent A LOT of time talking about citation). It was very difficult not to feel useless and overwhelmed. Pedagogies that offered concrete suggestions and promised visible results were really appealing.
Diversity, or difference, adds both new perspectives to composition theory and sites of contention. Royster wrote, “[T]he most salient point to acknowledge is that 'subject' position really is everything." By examining our students’ ways of knowing and looking at composition kaleidoscopically, we see that the teaching of composition is not cookie-cutter friendly. The arena of education is a contact zone, which by Royster’s definition is a place where disagreement is bound to occur. Like Miriam, I have taught (am teaching) students who are oftentimes labeled “Basic Writers” and pedagogies that promise concrete results (although oftentimes they do not deliver) are appealing. However, one of the questions being put forth by this week’s readings is what is the cost for our students if we buy into pedagogies and programs that sacrifice the individual for standardization (or marginalization) of voice?
ReplyDeleteShaughnessy, Lu, Royster, and Delpit all make reference to the idea of academic discourse versus dominant discourse. Delpit posits that one fear of some teachers is that they are acting as agents of oppression by teaching students of varying socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds mainstream discourses thereby damaging their home language or placing it beneath academic discourse, which tends to be situated in white middle-class values. This worry is reflective of the “we” not “I” stance of educating that Lyons urges us to take, a stance that is central to education if education to be a vehicle of democratic ideologies. While I agree with Larkin that students come to institutes of higher education “to gain access, to know how to perform in either academia or the professional workplace,” I also feel that devaluing a person’s home language is a way of devaluing his/her culture, which is criminal in my mind. As the beginning of Shaughnessy’s essay points out, many of the people labeled as “Basic Writers” go to college because they view it as a way to gain upward mobility in our capitalistic society. Many impoverished students see college as something they have to do in order to earn a living wage, which their parents do not make working long hours at multiple jobs; they do not go to college to have the voices of loved ones proclaimed inadequate. This is why Delpit’s message is so important; we must respect the multiplicity of voices that our students bring with them and help them to see that academic language is just one voice that they can choose to utilize.
What does difference add to composition theory?
ReplyDeleteThinking it best to start with a definition of “difference” in relation to these articles, I propose that it resoundingly centers on differences in the student body composite and their use of language. Out of this and into Melville’s “little lower layer” is the discovery by some teachers who are true to the profession that the BW (beginning writer) is his difference in language expression and usage. Influences like lower SES, neighborhood and peer support groups, parental literacy levels, and hours absorbing media shows all weigh heavily on the beginning college writer – the writer with very basic skills and experiences. The “pressures and codes and confusion” all emerge from these writers (393). As Mina Shaughnessy considers for her readers and we should too as educators, our language continues “stretching and reshaping and enriching itself with every language and dialect it has encountered. Our differences today within the composition classroom zeros in on the diversity of cultures and their languages that clash and enhance the course’s content and atmosphere. Given in Myers’ book Changing Our Minds: Negotiating English and Literacy, where he discusses the changing face of literacy in our educational system through America’s historical periods, we see that with our current new translation/critical literacy stage where student-centered learning and teaching is the norm and language diversity is embraced by teachers who need to bring their students to a level of acceptable SE before they graduate, the challenge is in the mix of students: so many come from parental backgrounds that are culturally and educationally diverse, where English is not spoken at home or education is not emphasized as the way out of the ghetto. But, what richness they bring to our language and our classrooms is obvious as new word additions appear ensconced in English.
Part i
Part ii
ReplyDeleteWhat we need to do is not fear the errors that they make, but give them first the confidence to write our language through open-minded dialogue and gentle but necessary corrections – those “errors” that Shaughnessy speaks of that catapult the writer into high anxiety and thus, cause him to shut down and disengage. But, it is also our job to get our students to bridge the discourse gorge with various sturdy bridges to traverse the academic field and the outside world field that they bounce between daily. It is “politically innocent vehicle of meaning” according to Shaughnessy; not so to Lu who counters that “because different discourses do not enjoy equal political power in current-day America” (773) and readily plunge the writer into the gorge filled with self-doubt and language poverty.
However, as Lu argues, meaning cannot be separated from language – it cannot be “coaxed to the surface” as it is not separate from how language is structured. Thus, as with all of these essays, although diverse dialogue is the overarching theme, the real nugget of gold is in the differences on how language is defined and determined as an operational element in the composing process. Different discourses do yield different language employed - a code switching like in speech occurs in writing. Shaughnessy seems to have de-emphasized this according to Lu and there lies a problem with recognizing differences in the discipline of composition studies. If neglected, Lu writes, Shaughnessy’s goals that she envisions may be unachievable (774). Social and political constraints always figure into our writing drafts and product. Our audience in many ways charges us a high cost of communicating. The outside world, although a potent change agent, is not the real focus in writing socially conscious writing: that voice comes from within the writer. No way should our language use in our writing be symptomatic of Hirsch’s “political neutrality” (780).
part iii
ReplyDeleteGranted, then have I cast aside the essence of audience awareness? Not so. Choosing the right word is never lost within writing that speaks strongly a particular view. What is objectionable is the use of candy-coated or euphemistic language that masks dangerously the writer’s real reason for writing and his purpose. Teaching such a stance that Paulo Freire states in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed negates the student’s “construction of knowledge” (qtd. in Wood, et al. 46). If our writers’ voices are disenchanted and lack the channel through written expression, we basically have placed them as Royster explains as disruptive (1118) – if the voice is not ours, we are confined to artificiality. So, what does this have to do with differences? It is in the “cross-cultural” talk that Royster so inspires in her essay that we bridge our differences in writing theory and move back to a focus on voice in relation to language use as a way to reclaim self-identity.
Now, here’s the kicker: the beauty of reading these essays in this order is to realize, first, the movement that composition studies is taking as in race and ethnicity, and secondly, to realize that differences in theoretical pedagogy of writing courses sync with our classroom’s student makeup. “Marginalized communities” (1119) such as African American and Native American tend to have their identities striped within a writing class, one focused on prescriptive grammar instruction or one focused on changing the writer’s language to conform to SAE. The “discourses of multiculturalism and critical race theory, or anyone who sides with the oppressed or who works for community renewal” (1137) is in essence the change agents for differences in how we teach composition and how voice should be taught as a necessary ingredient to understanding language variety; more importantly, teachers need to embrace the students’ differences in order for them to open up and write more clearly and expressively. As Angie summarizes above, "Delpit posits that one fear of some teachers is that they are acting as agents of oppression by teaching students of varying socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds mainstream discourses thereby damaging their home language or placing it beneath academic discourse, which tends to be situated in white middle-class values." The essays' topic of differences in discourse bespeaks their similarity - language as a change agent for the marginalized.
I'm going to draw on my past experiences here. I agree with Jen. Difference does inspire some anxiety but I also think it challenges teachers to revamp their teaching pedagogies.
ReplyDeleteAt UD, there is an abundance of ESL students and the writing program cannot accommodate all of them; to be clear, there is 1 section of ESL English 110. What happens to all the other ESL students? They get bumped into low-enrollment ENG 110, which is essentially considered remedial English and is meant for incoming freshmen that did not score high enough of their SATs or ACTs. I volunteered to teach a section of low-enrollment 110. I had 8 students. 1 from Nigeria and spoke French at home; 1 from Israel; 2 students who spoke Chinese and had what many teachers would consider only a basic understanding of English; and 4 students who spoke English but tested too low. Shaughnessy writes, "Most damaging of all, they have lost confidence in the very faculties that serve all language learners: their ability to distinguish between essential and redundant features of a language left them logical but wrong; their ability to draw analogies between what they knew of language when they began school and what they had to learn produced mistakes; and such was the quality of their instruction that no one saw the intelligence of their mistakes or thought to harness that intelligence in the service of language" (394).
That resonated with me because teaching low-enrollment 110 forced me to revise my teaching to better accommodate my students and challenged me to revise what I believe about writing and language. I decided to teach the course as a workshop because I wanted students to have lots of one-on-one time with me and to spend time working with their own writing, which is the best way to learn about writing. I taught them that systems of discourse have contexts: the way I talk to my best friends is not the way I talk to my mother or talk to Dr. Yancey, for example. Lu criticizes Shaughnessy's work because "such a view of the relationship between words and meaning overlooks the possibility that different ways of using words--different discourses--might exercise different constraints on how one 'crafts' the meaning 'one has in mind'" (774). Students have a right to their own language (channeling Peter Elbow here) and I didn't want to take that away so we spent a lot of time talking about the academy's language and its expectations and our writing activities led my students to practice using English in different contexts. Why certain ways of speaking English are more appropriate and valued more in some contexts than others. What I discovered about difference at the end of the semester is that my students wrote their reflections about feeling empowered that their language is considered "wrong," which was their past experiences and that they felt that they had learned what it means to write in college. I submitted more than one student's final work to the Arak Anthology, a collection of student writing. I was surprised that teaching this course challenged my understanding of academic discourse and the politics of the way we teach writing to students.
to be continued...
I'm in an illustrating mood tonight, so here's another story. Royster (in an article that I've read before) writes in his first scene, "I have found it extremely difficult to allow the voices and experiences of people that I care about deeply to be taken and handled so carelessly and without accountability by strangers" (1119). To me this speaks to the conferences we do in 1101 and 1102. I find that I am apprehensive about appropriating a student paper when they slide it across my desk and wait for the verdict on whether they did well or not. Like Royster argues, "An analysis of subject position reveals that these interpretations by those outside of the community are not random acts of unkindness. Instead, they embody ways of seeing, knowing, being, and acting that probably suggest as much about the speaker and the context as they do about the targeted subject matter. The advantage with this type of analysis, of course, is that we see the obvious need to contextualize the stranger's perspective among other interpretations and to recognize that an interpretive view is just that--interpretive" (1119). Thinking about this, then, makes me want to revise how I handle conferences. I had a student who wrote about a deeply abusive family situation and she wrote it in a vernacular English. I think I missed an opportunity to have a conversation about language and reader response. I was so apprehensive about commenting negatively about such a deeply personal experience for fear that criticizing the writing would make the student feel that I was dismissing the relevance of her experience. So, I didn't say anything about that paragraph other than that I was sorry to hear that it was something she lived through. Difference creates an opportunity to talk about ideology and discourse, to contextualize language use and why certain systems of language are privileged over others and the political implications of that; but difference can also be an unsettling fear of the unknown and (in my case) an anxiety about how to respond to a kind of writing that framed a personal narrative that I haven't encountered before.
ReplyDeleteand yet, there is still more...
Finally: Scott Lyons was my professor at my undergraduate institute and I took a senior seminar with him about Native American literature. He took a small group of us, myself included, to the CEA (College English Association) conference to present our final papers for the course. For me, Lyons expresses what the teaching of writing should become: "Rhetorical sovereignty is the inherent right and ability of peoples to determine their own communicative needs and desires in this pursuit, to decide for themselves the goals, modes, styles, and languages of public discourse. Placing the scene of writing squarely back into the particular contingency of the Indian rhetorical situation, rhetorical sovereignty requires of writing teachers more than a renewed commitment to listening and learning; it also requires a radical rethinking of how and what we teach as the written word at all levels of schooling, from preschool to graduate curricula and beyond" (1130). The paper I wrote for that course is about Sequoyah's syllabary, the first written alphabet for the Cherokee people. The syllabary is a sophisticated visual and textual discourse. It incorporates some appropriated English letters (I say appropriated because they are given their own rhetorical work) and some Native symbols and sounds. And it allowed the Cherokee people to write their own system of law and their own constitution and this effort went a long way to establishing their rhetorical sovereignty. The difference Lyons is calling for would require a radical revision of how the academy treats discourse. We would have to learn to value systems of language other than "Academy English" and talk about what that language (its modes and styles and goals, as Lyons puts it) is able to express that another system discourse would not be able to articulate in the same meaningful way.
ReplyDeleteFor me, although these readings seem to have little in common, when difference enters the composition classroom it requires that we revise our notions of language, our ideologies about what languages are valued and what languages are not. And then, we need writing teachers to embrace the challenge not ignore it.
I keep coming back to Berlin and his axiom that no ideology is innocent. If academic writing is a site of “conflict for socio-cultural power and agency,” as Logan nicely phrased it, than for poor students and students of color, academic discourse is a Catch-22. On one hand academic discourse reifies an oppressive language system and on the other hand it must be taught. Lisa Delpit argues that “members of society need access to dominant discourses to (legally) have access to economic power” (1317). She then writes that the aim of the student is to “master the dominant discourses and to transform them” (1318). Likewise, Min-Zhan Lu writes that formal English is a “condition which [students] must recognize but can also call into question and change” (emphasis mine, 779). So it seems that the purpose of acquiring this discourse is not to codify the values of the dominant class, but to provide the student with another voice by which he or she will “reshape” and “resist” an unjust system (Delpit).
ReplyDeleteIf no ideology is innocent, I see many pedagogical problems arising from this Catch-22. If one teaches the “the language of public transaction” (Shaughnessy) as a way to “cheat” the system, as Delpit proposes, what kind of ideology is motivating the teacher to do this? Many of these authors suggest that we as teachers are forthcoming in acknowledging the limitations and attendant problems of mastering this dominant discourse, but are teachers to withhold the ideology that underscores these beliefs? If ideology, like discourse, is so deeply embedded in our notion of self than how would a teacher even articulate an ideological position? What I’m wondering is at what point does composition instruction or any other field spill over into demagoguery? As Stephen said in his blog, the issue of difference raises the question of “what is right by students and their futures and how teachers should cater to that.” Is the job of a teacher to presuppose what is right and best for students? How do we know? Is there some public consensus? And further problems arise when one considers that composition teachers have themselves been trained in the dominant discourse despite passionately disagreeing with many of its oppressive ends. The role of the teacher in the classroom is precarious when dealing with difference.
Marx said that only revolution can overthrow the dominant ideologies. So in terms of teaching difference, are teachers trying to get revolt, assimilate, or assimilate-then-revolt? And aren’t we all already assimilated into an ideology that puts economy forward and first among all other values?
Our authors say that students need to develop their repertoire of available voices to fit a variety of rhetorical situations, but, troublingly, Lu argues that the dominant writing voice practiced in the classroom is really the teacher’s voice. In teaching writing, specifically the dominant academic discourse, she argues that teachers inadvertently transform the student’s meaning. I know I’ve had moments in conferences where, constrained by time or unsure how to proceed, I suddenly get prescriptive. The student and I are happy to be moving along, but I’m left with this queasy, lingering feeling that I’ve changed the original meaning of the words. In light of Delpit’s article I wonder if I haven’t unconsciously done worse: imposed my ideology on the student and compromised the way he or she views the subject.
I see difference working across these readings in several ways. First, each piece has identified a body of students in terms of shared “difference.” Mina Shaughnessy, for example, groups the students entering the “eleventh hour” of their educational careers as Basic Writers. Jacqueline Jones Royster discusses difference through an identification of the “subject position” of students -- in particular “Others” within the academy. It is this “subject position” that enables the visibility of cross-cultural boundary exchange that illustrates the importance of voicing and pov as shaping components in these exchanges. Paul Kei Matsuda’s difference is defined in terms of ESL students. If we think of a progression from “different” as an adjective describing various students within the academy to “difference” as a noun, we see the ways in which what is “different” is not limited to the local experiences of being or observing what is different. What is “different” instead emerges within a system and develops patterns -- patterns such as those discussed in the readings for this week. As a noun, “difference” becomes a social fact of our classrooms. Leigh’s experience at UD and Marian’s experience in Arizona speak to each other in multiple ways. These experiences also speak to a larger body of research that focuses on facilitating a dialogue that takes was is different in local experiences and projects it into the threads of disciplinary discussion that we are looking more closely at.
ReplyDeleteDifference is also operating across these readings in terms of the authors who are writing these pieces. Mina Shaughnessy was famously from the “frontier” of South Dakota, Paul Kei Matsuda is a Japanese American, Jacqueline Jones Royster finished her undergraduate at Spellman in Atlanta, Georgia. My point here is that these authors represent a variety of backgrounds -- they are themselves a snapshot of “difference” within the field.
Finally, there is difference as it is encountered by these authors in terms of their dealing with students. Elizabeth nods to this level, a the level that gives each of these pieces “material” that is illustrative of difference, when she writes: “Adding difference to the comp-theory mix brings about a realization of how much context/subject position/situatedness/power/history matter in the development of a new theory of composing.”
While we often focus on difference in the classroom in terms of practice, each of these micro discussions is getting at difference as it participates in the macro. Adding difference to the “mix of composition theory” seems to do three things in particular. First, it destabilizes any perception that the local is somehow representative of the whole. It reminds us of the importance of staying well informed and informing our theories of composition by reading widely across the field. Paul Kei Matsuda gestures to this when he reminds readers of the importance of reading TESL literature even if you consider yourself to not be teaching this particular groups of students. As our experiences resonate through the systematicity of our culture and the ways in which higher education participates in this, these experiences are not representative of a larger whole.
ReplyDeleteSecondly, adding difference to the mix destablizes that which these differences are discussed as being different from. Our glimpse into this conversation on difference illustrates the ways in which difference is material and lived in the experiences of our students, but necessarily (re)constructed within our textual discussions. Students clearly experience multiple, overlapping and conflicting differences. However, as this is handled in the literature, we are inclined to discuss these differences in terms of skill level, language background, race, class, etc. --- in other words, difference singular. Thus, the center, what all of these students are “different” from, withers away and becomes increasingly destabilized.
Finally, adding difference to the mix provides a mechanism of acknowledging the situatedness of what are often positioned as the foundational theories of composition within our field -- expressivism, process, etc. Theory can never be far removed from material context and ideological inheritance. These and other foundational premises of our field are reflective of the difference in experience and ideology that we as practitioners bring to and frame our work with. Difference is one mechanism that enables us to create more of a rich and kaleidoscopic body of understanding rather than a monolithic structure that is regarded as fixed. Jacqueline Jones Royster writes to this end when she says: “Using subject position as a terministic screen in cross-boundary discourse permits analysis to operate kaleidoscopically, thereby permitting interpretation to be richly informed by the converging of dialectal perspectives.”
Spencer beat me to referencing Berlin as a jumping off point for these readings. I too kept thinking back to his axiom that rhetoric is “always already ideological.” That is to say, each of these readings necessarily takes an ideological stance, even as they try to interrogate other ideologies. And we, as readers and responders, in turn bring our own ideologies to bear as we consider them. It all leaves me a bit baffled, even as this post-modern conundrum is hardly new territory for me. With reference to these readings about “difference,” the fundamental question seems to be if everything is ideological and culturally inscribed, how do we go about making good and ethical choices about how we conduct ourselves in the composition classroom? Whose “good” is being served by a given pedagogy? How can we know?
ReplyDeleteI think we can all agree (although beginning a sentence that way feels rather dangerous) that we want to serve our students as well as possible in the composition classroom. But it turns out, as we see from this week’s readings, that is a much more difficult task than we might have imagined. It also seems that we might need to back up a step or ten from what we thought was the starting point of the endeavor of teaching composition.
Larkin put forward the idea that we should not withhold the dominant discourse from students because of our own ideas of honoring difference (speak up if I’ve misinterpreted you!). I admit, I’ve had similar thoughts when considering how and what to teach my students. It’s a suggestion that has strong echoes of Shaughnessy’s piece. What I wonder about that idea now, considering it in reference to all the readings for this week, is who and what should we be serving in the classroom?
Suppose that some students in my class are less familiar with the dominant discourse than others. Not a crazy supposition by any means. My impulse is definitely to “correct” them. This feels helpful. But am I really helping a student by doing this? Even if my instruction helps a particular student to be more successful in the dominant culture, what have I really done for them if the cost of this “help” is reinforcing an oppressive cultural discourse that erases and denigrates competing voices? So, is the goal of the composition classroom to help individual students communicate more successfully in the dominant discourse? Or is is to attempt to gradually reshape the dominant discourse into something hopefully less oppressive and more open to different voices and kinds of discourse? I suspect the answer is somewhere in between.
I find myself dwelling on Lyons’ piece. It’s quite different from some of the others. What stuck with me about it was how clearly he showed that language is not merely words that have no effect. Words can be used to bring about real change. And when that change is meant to benefit one group of people by restricting the freedoms and sovereignty of another, we should take notice of it. The situation of the (presumably) well-meaning composition teacher would not seem to have much in common with the actions of the U.S. government regarding the legal status of American Indians, but I think that example should remind us that the work we do, teaching students how to use words, is not neutral or without consequence. And that, I suppose, is what I think a discussion of difference brings to composition. It forces us to surrender the attractive notion that, as Min-Zhan Lu says, “language [is] a politically innocent vehicle of meaning” (772).
Quoting Elizabeth: Adding difference to the comp-theory mix brings about a realization of how much context/subject position/situatedness/history/power matter in the development of a theory of composing.
ReplyDelete*agreed: how much *do* they matter, especially given that presumably there is an audience to whom one is writing?
Stephen said, "students (and citizens in general) are capable of commanding a range of different voices": is this a new insight, or have we always known it? In other words, is what we see in the readings this week a new willingness to consider this range "normal" and perhaps even valuable? What are the advantages of doing so? What are the disadvantages?
ReplyDeleteLogan says, "As Stephen discusses in his blog as well, I believe the readings this week also illuminate the ways in which language/discourse/writing in an academic setting become sites of conflict for sociocultural power and agency." That's right, of course, and we see it play out both in the public and in the classroom: what are the connections between both?
ReplyDeleteJen says, "Shaughnessy, Royster, Delpit, Lyons, and Matsuda point to the need to value difference and respect it because this valuing and respect offers access to different ways of seeing, knowing, being, and acting." At the same time, difference is also, as Jen notes, sometimes (perhaps often?), a source of tension. So is difference principally linguistic or cultural? Is there a way or ways of valuing difference inside of a curriculum? How does that work in a school setting where there are certain expectations that students are supposed to meet that may not afford such difference?
ReplyDeleteLarkin says, "They [students]come to us to gain access, to know how to perform in either academia or the professional workplace, and reinforcing the way they already write and speak does not get them that access they are very explicitly here to gain." Point taken. *But* does it matter how we go about it? And if so, what does that mean for teaching?
ReplyDeleteMarian speaks to the issue of labor: she's probably right that the more challenging the work of teaching, the lower it appears on a ladder of status/prestige. On the other hand, does it offer the most satisfaction? As important, Marian raises issues about the significance of difference in a challenging pedagogical setting: how does difference play out there? How might it?
ReplyDeleteAngie says, "This is why Delpit’s message is so important; we must respect the multiplicity of voices that our students bring with them and help them to see that academic language is just one voice that they can choose to utilize." I suspect that most (all?) of us agree with us. I think part of the appeal these readings make is for us to see difference horizontally, not vertically, and to treat all discourses as assets, not deficits. But what does this mean, specifically, in a classroom? And what is the connect between classroom and public at large and/or workplace?
ReplyDeleteAnnaMaria says, "Now, here’s the kicker: the beauty of reading these essays in this order is to realize, first, the movement that composition studies is taking as in race and ethnicity, and secondly, to realize that differences in theoretical pedagogy of writing courses sync with our classroom’s student makeup.
ReplyDeleteFollowing up on the quote: what are the differences in pedagogy that accommodate or support our students? And as interesting to me, if this is the pattern of development in the field/discipline (ie, increasing recognition and valuing of difference), is this a pattern we should expect to continue, and if so, why might that be important?
ReplyDeleteLeigh says, "I was so apprehensive about commenting negatively about such a deeply personal experience for fear that criticizing the writing would make the student feel that I was dismissing the relevance of her experience. So, I didn't say anything about that paragraph other than that I was sorry to hear that it was something she lived through. Difference creates an opportunity to talk about ideology and discourse, to contextualize language use and why certain systems of language are privileged over others and the political implications of that; but difference can also be an unsettling fear of the unknown and (in my case) an anxiety about how to respond to a kind of writing that framed a personal narrative that I haven't encountered before." So what does this mean in terms of assignments we make? And what does this mean in terms of how much explanation we provide to students? In other words, this approach makes sense to me, but it does change our curriculum, doesn't it?
ReplyDeleteSpencer says, "On one hand academic discourse reifies an oppressive language system and on the other hand it must be taught." Well, there's the tension in a nutshell. So a couple of questions. Isn't all language by definition oppressive if forced on a person? If so, it is academic language per se, or is it the forcing that's at issue here? On the other hand, isn't language--qua Bakhtin--flexible? Doesn't it change with use? In which case it's not a fixed entity? And do we worry about these same issues when it comes to the language of the major? Why/why not, and does that matter?
ReplyDeleteKatie says, "What is “different” instead emerges within a system and develops patterns -- patterns such as those discussed in the readings for this week." Exactly, though of course it's fair to note that you saw the patterns in part because of the way I clustered the readings. Was this clustering helpful or not? And as Katie says, given so much difference, the center becomes decentered, in Yeats' terms, perhaps a center that will not hold. Is this a problem? And if so, what do we make of it?
ReplyDeleteStacy says, "With reference to these readings about “difference,” the fundamental question seems to be if everything is ideological and culturally inscribed, how do we go about making good and ethical choices about how we conduct ourselves in the composition classroom? Whose “good” is being served by a given pedagogy? How can we know?" For teaching, and as others have suggested, this seems to be a central question. For theory, what does all this difference mean? For example, is subject position the defining feature of any rhetorical situation, qua Royster?
ReplyDeleteIs there only one subject position? Or a primary one? Hmmm
ReplyDelete